The Forger (10 page)

People were shuffling past.

“Il est temps, mesdames et messieurs,”
said the guard in a droning voice.
“Messieurs, -dames. Il est temps.”
It is time. It is time.

Valya moved on out of sight, flowing with the crowd.

I turned to Pankratov, to see whether he had noticed Valya, but his eyes were fixed upon the painting of the
Medusa.
He was lost in it. “This,” said Pankratov, “is my art.”

When he said that, I forgot about Valya.

His art, he had called it. I ran the words around in my head a few times. My teeth slowly clamped together as I hesitated to believe what now seemed obvious—that Pankratov was crazy after all, past the line of eccentricity and the twilight world of genius, having lost track of the boundary between the world of dreams and the less satisfying world that surrounds it. The fact seemed unavoidable. It was as if one of the Louvre guards was walking through my head, swishing his hands, shooing the last reservations from my own mind.
Il est fou, messieurs, -dames. Il est fou.

I glanced uneasily at the painting and then at Pankratov.

Pankratov still had his hands raised toward the Géricault, his mouth set hard with pride.

“It’s by Géricault,” I said quietly.

“Of course it is.” He dropped his hands. “Come with me,” he ordered.

We returned to the space in the wall where the door had vanished. He pressed against it and the door clicked open. We returned to the dim passageway that led out to the street.

“Sevier,” said Pankratov, calling to the guard as he strode down the hall, “I want to see the Géricault pictures.”

“Very good.” Sevier had taken his shoes off and was now massaging his feet. He unclipped a set of keys from his belt and handed them to Pankratov. “You know where they are.”

Pankratov opened a small door beside the desk. A smell of paper billowed out, musty and faintly sweet. A smell of patience and quiet. Inside, the room was stacked with boxes of documents, which lay on shelves that divided the space.

“Go on.” Pankratov waved me in. “Go on.”

I obeyed.

He walked straight over to a box, hauled it down and let it thump onto the floor.

Coppery light filtered in through the blinds. The air in the room was still and warm. I felt around me the great solidity of the building. The permanence of it. As if it knew somehow that even though it had been built by man to glorify man, it was greater now than the people who had built it. It glorified only itself. I felt that about a lot of the great buildings in Paris. I sensed that they knew what they were.

We crouched down over the box of photos.

“Here.” Pankratov held one out to me.

It was a glossy black-and-white of the Géricault. The entire center of the painting was gone. It had been replaced by tatters of canvas and the wall behind it, which stood pitted and white beneath its dried blood–colored paint. For a few seconds, my eyes drifted around the outside of the picture, where the painting was still whole and recognizable, my mind not wanting to admit what it was seeing.

“Last year,” said Pankratov, “a man named Alphonse Gradovich walked into the building, right down that hallway there.” He gestured to where Sevier was sitting, back at his perch, massaging his feet with tiny groans of pleasure. “He was carrying a double-barreled shotgun. Nearly blew Sevier’s head off. Sevier!” Pankratov shouted past me. “Show this man the shotgun marks!”

Obediently, as if he had rehearsed the movements, Sevier stopped rubbing his feet and aimed his finger at various scrapes along the wall where the pellets had ricocheted. The places had been painted over, but they were clear to see now that Sevier had pointed them out. “This close! With both barrels!” he said and pinched the air in front of him. “And if I hadn’t been so quick—” With a broad cutting sweep, he slapped one palm across the other.

“He was asleep,” whispered Pankratov, “and when Gradovich walked in, Sevier woke up and fell backwards off his chair.”

“If I hadn’t been so quick—” Sevier said again.

“You’d be only slightly less active than you are at the moment,” Pankratov finished his sentence.

Sevier waved him away. “Brother, you wait until you have been shot at.”

Pankratov straightened up. “I
have
been shot at.” He took the picture back from me and looked at it himself. “Gradovich walked into the room with the Géricault. He went right up to it, reloaded his gun and emptied both barrels into the painting. He blew out the whole center, as you can see. The guards caught up with him before he made it out to the street.”

“And I can tell you,” said Sevier, “that Gradovich may be the only man in history to have his head beaten against the Nike of Samothrace.”

“It took me every night for eight months to repair the damage to the Géricault,” said Pankratov.

“You restored it?” I asked. “But there isn’t a mark on it now! I want to see it again.”

“You don’t need to,” he said. “You are right. There is no trace.”

“Wait a minute,” I said slowly. “I never heard about any of this. It would have been news all over the world.”

“No,” he said, “you didn’t hear about any of it. The whole thing was kept quiet. The curators here didn’t want that painting to become famous for the damage that was done to it. They just wanted it to go on being famous for itself.”

“What happened to the man with the gun?”

“He’s in an asylum. He escaped from one to begin with. Now he’s back inside and no one believes a word he says, which no one did before.”

“Why did he do it?”

“Ah.” Pankratov nodded, expecting the question. “Gradovich claimed to be the descendant of someone who died aboard the
Medusa.
He said he hadn’t known there was a painting about the shipwreck until he came to Paris and went to the Louvre. Once he’d set eyes on the painting, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was driving him more mad than he already was. Gradovich said he had to destroy it. I used to think about that when I was working on the Géricault. I believe I understand what he was going through. So you see”—Pankratov flicked the photograph with his fingernails—“this is what I do best. When there’s a call for it. Not every piece is as important as this one. Not every one must be secret. But many of them are. It requires a negation of everything I used to live for. Not to seek fame. Not to require attention.”

“How did you find out you were good at it?”

“Not just good,” Sevier corrected me. “Pankratov is the best.”

“I discovered it by accident,” explained Pankratov. “There was some work belonging to another painter which got damaged in the fire at my old studio. My own paintings were too far gone, but in trying to mend this other piece, I suddenly understood that I could do it. I thought I was a painter,” he said, twisting his hand in on itself, as if tracing the path of a wisp of smoke, “but this is what I really am.”

“You
were
a painter. A great one, from all I hear.”

“All right,” he said, “maybe I was good. But I exhausted myself. I got so tired in here.” He bounced the heel of his palm off his forehead. “Some days, I would set up the canvas and stare at it for an hour and then be so exhausted I’d have to go back to bed. But with restoration, it’s different.” He drew his fingers close together, like a man learning to pray. “It’s about the creation of the paint itself. Using only those materials available at the time. Then the lacquer. Then the aging process. The precision of it. The cheating of time! Do you know that my finest work in that Géricault is the part Géricault got wrong.”

“Got wrong? What do you mean?”

“He was experimenting with different pigments and mediums. Not all of it worked. Did you see those patches on the canvas that look like tar?”

I nodded.

“The pigment corroded after a couple of decades. It is actually eating away through the primer and into the canvas. Or it was, anyway. My job was to re-create the exact look of the experimental pigment, but to make it in such a way that it no longer damaged the canvas underneath it. Now
that
was difficult!”

“People should know about this,” I said. “About what you have done.”

“No,” said Pankratov, “they should not. I am not doing this for people. Not even for Géricault. Not even if he came back from the grave to ask me to do it himself. I am doing it for me. Don’t you see? If people knew, if they all came to admire the work the way they came to admire my paintings before they were burned, then it would no longer be my art. Then I would be doing it for someone else. There is only one real sacrifice an artist can make, and that is to accept the possibility of being forgotten. Once you have done that, then it is possible no longer to care.”

“He has explained it to me,” said Sevier, rustling the newspaper in front of his face, “and I still don’t get it.”

“But
you
do,” Pankratov told me. He stood, knees crackling as if his legs were filled not with flesh and bone but with tiny pebbles that rearranged themselves each time he moved.

Suddenly I understood why he had brought me here. Because even in his world of anonymous brilliance, he still needed someone to understand what he was doing. The only thing I didn’t see was why he had chosen me. Perhaps, I thought, it’s because I’m a stranger here. Someone just passing through. He needs someone to grasp the enormity of his work. The sacrifice of it. Pankratov needs to see in someone’s face the proof he isn’t mad, because he is no longer sure himself.

We walked out past Sevier, who had gone back to massaging his feet and was saying, as if someone else were doing it for him, “There. Oh, there. Magnificent.”

The purple twilight wrapped around us as we headed home along the sidewalks, past the late-working people with their thousand-yard stares of fatigue, trying to switch off the blind-rushing energy of the day so they could sleep that night.

“If it weren’t for the fire,” I told him, “you might never have known.”

He considered this. “If the Germans take over Europe, it won’t matter whether there was a fire or not. I was officially disapproved of by the National Socialist Party,” he said. “My paintings were declared
entartete Kunst.
”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Art whose existence degrades all other art,” he said with a sigh. “Something like that. Along with Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Munch, Braque and a few dozen others. Many of them were publicly burned in Berlin last year by the Nazis as a protest, just as many in the Louvre will be, or the Jeu de Paume, if the Germans reach Paris.”

“I saw Valya back there,” I said.

“Back where?”

“At the museum. She was in the next room over. She was looking at some paintings. She was taking notes.”

“No,” said Pankratov. “That couldn’t have been her. She’s not interested in any kind of art.”

“It
was
her.”

“Valya would rather spend her afternoons sitting up on the platform at the atelier than wandering around the Louvre, and she doesn’t much care for that platform, as you well know. Believe me, I may not know my own daughter as well as I should, but I know that much about her.”

I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach. “Your
daughter?
”

“Yes,” he said. “She’s my daughter.”

“I had no idea! Neither does anyone else!” I was practically shouting in his ear.

“She’s not actually my daughter,” said Pankratov, “but I raised her.”

“I thought you came out of Finland!” I shook my head. “Just you and that chair of yours!”

He waved the flat of his hand toward the ground to make me lower my voice. “Me, the chair and Valya. She always leaves herself out of that story.”

“Well, Jesus,” I sighed. I tried to imagine the look on Fleury’s face when I told him about this.

“She doesn’t like people to know,” said Pankratov.

“Why not?”

Pankratov rolled his shoulders, wincing slowly. “Here in Paris, she is a refugee, the same as I am,” he said. “But she is also an orphan. That is too much for her. When you are displaced, you always think about where you come from. It’s a question that people who are not displaced never have to ask. You, for example, you know where you come from.”

“Narragansett,” I said. As I spoke the word, some distillate of memory splashed suddenly into my eyes. I went blind from the fast-returning images of the spray off breaking waves across grayish-khaki sand the consistency of granulated sugar.

“But if you don’t know,” Pankratov continued, “your life becomes about not knowing. Some people can stand it. Some people can even profit from the lack of knowing. But she’s not one of those. To create a balance in her life, she has made for herself a world of ideals that neither she nor anyone else can maintain. So nobody gets to belong. That is the hard ground on which she lives.”

“But you still work together,” I said, trying to be optimistic.

“She is too idealistic to stay employed anywhere else.”

“If it weren’t for you, she’d probably be dead.”

“That’s true.” He tilted his head sharply in agreement. “But it wasn’t her choice to live or die. She doesn’t owe me for that.”

Now I understood why she hated him. And she
did
hate him. Part of him anyway. And it didn’t matter if she loved him as well, because that didn’t reduce any of the hate. The two extremes existed side by side in her image of Pankratov. What she hated most was that he didn’t love her best. What he loved, more than her or any other living thing, was his work. That was why he stayed alone now.

I wondered if it was inevitable. Maybe you could not be devoted to the work without letting everything else suffer. It was not about how much time you had in each day. It was about the expenditure of passion.

The night crowds were gathering. People walked more slowly, some with broad and careful footsteps, as if they were measuring the number of paces between one place and another. Eventually, we reached the place where Pankratov would leave to go to his home and I would turn down the Rue Descalzi. The city hummed and roared around us, the gears of its great engine winding down.